


The Tramp and the Townie

by valantha



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - 1930s, F/M, First Meetings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-21
Updated: 2015-01-21
Packaged: 2018-03-08 13:40:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,363
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3211154
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/valantha/pseuds/valantha
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Philip – an honest, hardworking Boy Scout – meets a captivatingly exotic and mysterious Tramp with three street urchins.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Tramp and the Townie

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to xyber116 for being my Beta

Philip set the garbage tin down with a faint grunt. He swung the movie theater door closed, listening for the snick of it fully closing before picking up the tin once more. Sometimes the door didn’t fully shut, and would blow open, coating the back of the theater in fine dust. And that was just more work than he wanted to deal with tonight.

“Excuse me, sir. Are you going to incinerate that?”

Philip turned, looking for the source of the voice. A young woman, maybe a year or two younger than his 17 years stepped out of the shadows.

She was the most exotic and the most beautiful girl he’d seen outside the silver screen. She had silky black hair, clear olive skin, and oriental black eyes. As his eyes left her face and took in her clean but beyond-threadbare dresses – yes plural, layered presumably to cover more – and bare feet, he realized she was a tramp. Maybe even a fallen woman. _She didn’t look like a fallen woman; what did a fallen woman look like anyways?_

Philip pulled himself from his introspection; “Um, yeah, but I uh, have some stale popcorn…” he nodded back to the theater. His mother – and Nicholas, the manager – would kill him if they found out about this.

Then it was his turn to be examined. He stood firm as her ebony – that was the right word, right? – eyes darted over his body and stared into his soul. His cheeks warmed but he refused to break eye contact; he had nothing to hide.

The girl nodded once firmly, which must have been some sort of signal, as from the deeper shadows in the alleyway three street urchins appeared. At the forefront was a girl of maybe seven clutching a rag-doll. There was another girl about the same age as his 12-year-old cousin and a boy, perhaps a well-grown 10 or a bit older and gawky. They all wore clean rags and but for maybe a day’s worth of dust were clean themselves.

Now, he **knew** the theater manager would really kill him – letting a whole flock of street children into his theater, even if they were _clean_ street children. But he couldn’t take it back now. He didn’t want to either.

Philip set the garbage tin near the incinerator chimney and opened the back door for the exotic girl and her siblings? Friends?

As they stepped into the well-lit lobby of the movie theater, and Philip got a better look at the children – and particularly their pale skin – he deduced the four were likely friends. The two younger girls had wavy brown hair and big, somber brown eyes and the boy had curly blonde hair and curious blue eyes.

The oldest girl scanned the lobby before fixing her eyes on Philip. He could feel his cheeks warm under her scrutiny once again.

He shook off her regard and went behind the concession stand, making quick work sorting the night’s leftover popcorn from the un-popped kernels. He filled two waxed paper bags with the not-yet stale popcorn and placed one beside the rapidly chattering middle children – they had some sort of fancy accent he couldn’t quite place – and gave the other to the exotic young woman who was fixing the youngest’s braid.

“Thank you,” she murmured.

Reluctantly, Philip left the well-behaved children in the lobby to finish cleaning up the theater proper.

When he returned, he spied the youngest napping on a padded bench, the eldest wiping down the concession stand counter, and not a single kernel or crumb on the floor.

“Um, Miss, you d-d-don’t have to do that,” Philip stuttered.

“I didn’t touch the till,” she retorted angrily, but softly enough not to wake the little girl.

It hadn’t even crossed his mind, and it should have. It would cost him his job if any of the theater’s hard-earned nickels and dimes went missing.

Some of this must have made it to his face as the young woman lowered her fists and nodded in half apology.

“I’ve got to do something to thank you. We may be down, but we’re not out. We aren’t bums neither.”

Philip shrugged, “It’s nothing, it woulda just been fed to the pigs.”

The girl looked unconvinced.

“I’m Philip,” he introduced himself, in an attempt to turn the conversation.

“You can call me Melinda,” the young woman began, “That’s Skye, and that’s Leo and Jemma.”

She pointed to the little girl curled around her rag doll and then to boy and middle girl who had just exited the bathroom, having apparently washed up thoroughly, given their pink cheeks and damp shirt cuffs.

“Thank you very much for the sit-down, but my family and I need to hoof it.”

Philip glanced at the little girl curled up on the bench – Skye – and then back at Melinda, replying without thinking, “You can stay; I mean, if you want to.”

Melinda nodded at the two other children who hushed up right quick, and settled down on the other padded bench. She gestured way from the lobby, which Philip took to mean she wanted to talk somewhere away from the sleeping children. He took her to the ticket booth.

As soon as the door closed behind him, Melinda had a knife to his throat – it was a small one, best for coring apples and like, but still it was pressed against his throat!

Philip’s palms were sweating like none other. His Mom had always warned him against wanderers, and his Dad – God keep him – had warned him against the wiles of womenfolk, but he’d never imaged himself in this sort of situation. They’d not be able to imagine it either, he reckoned.

“What do you want,” Melinda hissed out in the most terrifying manner Philip had ever heard. Even Fu Manchu would have been scared of her.

It took a few careful swallows before Philip could work up enough spit to talk, “Nothing. I don’t want nothing.”

She stared into his soul. His toes curled under her glare.

“Honest. I was just trying to help you, be a Good Samaritan.”

Melinda snorted. Philip felt sorry for her, or he would if she put the knife away; it was sad, not being able to trust people at all.

"Nobody’s nice for no reason,” she said as she slid the knife back into a pocket or something, it was gone and that was what all Philip cared about.

Philip crumpled a little – just a little – against the ticket booth door as his body tried to sort out whether it needed to flee or faint.

Now that he could breathe without slicing himself, he still felt more sorry than mad. But Philip was glad his bladder had been empty.

Cautiously he stepped away from the ticket booth door – there wasn’t much more room in the booth that wasn’t taken up by their two bodies and the ticket collector’s stool – Melinda retreated, allowing him to open up the booth.

He fled – a bit – to the lobby, and was greeted by two faces with identical mixes of caution, curiosity, and fear.

The fear subsided as Melinda trailed behind him and told them, “We’re gonna flop here tonight.”

“Keen.”

“Snazzy,” they said in unison before they curled up on their bench.

Melinda made her way over to Skye, and as she curled up around the younger girl, her eyes never left his.

A piquant mixture of desire and fear shivered up his spine as he turned off the lights and locked up the theater.

As he trudged home, his mind played over the exhilarating meeting as he made half-formed plans for tomorrow. Despite the fact that he closed today, he also opened tomorrow – whatever, his mother and aunt needed all the money he could give them – and his aunt had a stack of old clothes bound for the church charity bin…

Only after he had tumbled into bed half-clothed did his body catch up to the fact that that had been the closest he’d ever been to a girl – not counting his cousins, of course. Nope, he wasn’t going to be able to get much sleep. No rest for the weary.


End file.
